Archive for May, 2013

How often do you see volleyball team chatting with deans, Taiko drummers mingling with landscape gardiners, medical researchers in a tête-à-tête with major donors? “It was what a university community should be. That, to me, was moving,” said dancer Aleta Hayes, one of the performers for last night’s The Symphonic Body (we wrote about the event here.) And she was right.

When a live mic was stuck in front of my face two days ago, I asked the performers what they got out of the experience. During and after the performance last night, I found out, without any explanation needed. The sense of Stanford community was joyously evident, at the Bing Concert Hall event, and at the reception afterwards. Although about 75 “performers” were onstage, choreographerAnn Carlson worked through about 1,000 recommendations to get to the final cast – a lot declined or dropped out. So even more people were involved in the experience than might have been apparent last night.

Hayes with her dance troupe, Chocolate Heads (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

Here’s how Carlson worked: she followed the chosen performers around for a day, watching their gestures, listening to their phrases – “then telling us how to act like ourselves,” said Matthew Tiews, Executive Director of Arts Programs. Onstage, landscape workers pruned invisible trees, Continuing Studies dean Charlie Junkerman removed and cleaned his glasses over and over again, Philippe Cohen, executive director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, stood up repeatedly and pointed to something on the invisible horizon.

“It touches my bone-deep and dead serious belief that all movement is dance movement,” said dancer Diane Frank. “It means that every moment of movement might be transformative, might refresh our senses, if we attend to it wholeheartedly, alert to its qualities in the doing. Real dancing is an embodied attitude toward movement, not a training regimen.”

Cohen on the job. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

She added, “Besides, I like to connect with other people and to laugh a lot – both were large parts of the rehearsal process.”

During the question-and-answer period with the audience afterwards, one viewer noted the ephemeral nature of the project – nearly a year of work for a single, one-night performance. Was the ephemerality part of the nature of the night?

“Definitely. Absolutely. I’m not doing this for a career,” said Cohen. “It was incredibly meditative. At the end of the day, we had to put everything out of our mind. That was absolutely wonderful.”

Did anything surprise the cast about the performance? “I was surprised that I was in it,” admitted Associate Dean Debra Satz, to laughter.

As usual, Mary Nolan had the last word. When someone asked the performers “What comes next?” Her reply was instant: “the Tony awards.”

“A kind of post-modernism that allows chance and randomness to play a part.”

The theory is that choreographer Ann Carlson‘s The Symphonic Body, which will be performed tonight at 8 p.m. in the Bing Concert Hall, is entirely self-explanatory. You should be able to walk in cold and appreciate what you see onstage.

I don’t buy it, at least not entirely. But then, I’m not a “hang loose in the moment” kind of guy. I like to have a little background about the artist’s intentions. So consider this a public service for others, like me, who are high-information art-lovers.

Here’s a start, from the Stanford website:

Carlson

The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are individual dances, custom made for each person, choreographed from the movements they already do. The particular choreographed gestures themselves become part of a larger movement tapestry within each performer and within the piece as a whole. By engaging with this performance practice members of the Stanford community come together in concert to expand, renew and re-experience the artistry embedded in the everyday.

A visit to the Bing Concert Hall rehearsal yesterday brought its surprises. Scattered among the 50 or 60 performers were some very familiar faces: Debra Satz, associate dean for the humanities and arts; dancer Aleta Hayes, a lecturer in the Drama Department; Charlie Junkerman, dean of Continuing Studies, and Philippe Cohen, executive director of the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

According to Peggy Phelan, professor in the arts:

The body that Ann has orchestrated in tonight’s performance is composed of students, researchers, staff, faculty, deans. Some are athletes; some are musicians; some are tree cutters; one is a Classicist; some are administrators, some are continuing education students. Some are seasoned performers; some have never been to a symphony or performed in one before. All of them rehearsed and entered into an act of collective creation. They are unlikely to have met before this occasion and they are unlikely to work together again. They created this body through a network of recom- mendations. They were named as people others found inspiring. Ann approached them and invited them to join. The members of this symphony are united by the gesture of saying Yes, the most vital word in Stanford’s vocabulary. To be the auditors of this Yes requires patience, attention, and relaxation. Strum your fingers, tap your toes and hear those everyday sounds as your own symphony. Use their music as a way to enter your own. Carlson’s makes Yes the chorus of an expanded soundscape; watch closely and you’re sure to hear it.

Ann Carlson conducts

Ann’s visit coincides with Anne Carson‘s residency at Stanford, where she is a Mohr Visiting Poet – the two Annes are friends. Unfortunately both visits occurred during a very busy month for me. The whole shebang would have blown by me entirely, had it not been for Florentina Mocanu-Schendel‘s persistent beseeching, telling me that both Annes are people I absolutely must meet. Florentina, assistant director for The Symphonic Body, was, as always, right.

I went cold into the rehearsal and meeting with Ann, at the Bing Concert Hall. She was small, bright, energetic, wearing incongruous, brand-new sneakers – at least they looked brand new – and carrying a heavy-looking bag. I look forward to meeting the second Anne tonight, at the performance.

The poet Anne’s credentials are stunning: she’s received the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award.

Anne Carson is a professor of Classics as well as a poet, essayist and translator. “In the small world of people who keep up with contemporary poetry,” wrote Daphne Merkin in theNew York Times Book Review, “Anne Carson, a Canadian professor of classics, has been cutting a large swath, inciting both envy and admiration.”Carson has gained both critical accolades and a wide readership over the course of her “unclassifiable” publishing career. In addition to her many highly-regarded translations of classical writers such as Sappho and Euripides, and her triptych rendering of An Oresteia (2009), Carson has published poems, essays, libretti, prose criticism and verse novels that often cross genres. Known for her supreme erudition—Merkin called her “one of the great pasticheurs”—Carson’s poetry can also be heart-breaking and she regularly writes on love, desire, sexual longing and despair. Always an ambitious poet whatever her topic or genre, Merkin wrote of Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, “I don’t think there has been a book since Robert Lowell’s Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing.”

Sudden fame. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

As for performance artist Ann, she’s been keeping the 50 or 60 Stanford students, faculty, and staff on its feet. What’s in it for the performers? “It’s fun, there are no lines to learn, some one else is directing/conducting, all I have to do is sit there and follow the program, no pressure, and it looks like it’s cool to watch,” said drama professor Rush Rehm. “Art with little effort, using personal gestures and movement, and shaping the ‘commonplace’ by playing with time, groupings. Sound like he’s taking it easy? Give him a break. He’s been rehearsing Beckett’s Happy Days, “which is the just about most demanding, meticulous play ever written, diabolical in its specificity.

“The Symphonic Body is like recess for me!” he said. “It’s part of a kind of post-modernism that allows chance and randomness to play a part.”

During the rehearsal, one of performers, Matthew Tiews, Executive Director of Arts Programs, obeyed the impromptu spirit of the moment and handed me a live mic to address the performers with a question. I was caught offguard. “What do you get out of this experience?” I asked.

I’ve always loved Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate, ever since it first came out in 1986. A dozen years later, I interviewed Seth in London – article here. Now the book is coming to Stanford, in its operatic incarnation. Here’s what I wrote for the Stanford News Service:

The homecoming is long overdue: The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth’s 1986 novel-in-verse, was born among Stanford’s sandstone buildings and palm trees. Now the Bay Area will have a chance to hear highlights of composer Conrad Cummings’ opera of the novel.

A multimedia presentation at the new Bing Concert Hall Studio at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 30, will include readings of Seth’s verse by current Stegner Fellows and Stanford students, a video of a 2010 staged workshop of the opera at Lincoln Center and a discussion with Cummings. John Henry Davis, who directed the Lincoln Center workshop production, is also directing the Stanford program. Seth will provide a video welcome.

“It’s beautiful, compelling, powerful – and it’s a production that deserves to be seen in the Bay Area,” said English Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, producer of the program, “From Lyric Novel to Lyric Stage.”

The event is sponsored by the Department English and its Creative Writing Program, the American Studies Program and the Stanford Arts Institute. The event is sold out, but unfilled seats will be released at 7:45 p.m. before the program begins.

The ‘Great Californian Novel’

San Francisco native Cummings, who teaches at Juilliard, discovered The Golden Gate soon after it was published and was hooked by “that special magical nostalgia I feel for my hometown San Francisco: the magic of the vistas, the feeling of the air, the presence of the ocean, the sense of space, and a certain sense of grandeur and personal emotion.”

In his book, Seth deprecated his foray in formal sonnets as “this whole passé extravaganza,” but he received rare accolades. The late Gore Vidal, who could be notoriously stinting of praise, wrote, “Although we have been spared, so far, the Great American Novel, it is good to know that the Great Californian Novel has been written, in verse (and why not?): The Golden Gate gives great joy.”

Conrad Cummings

Here’s how it began. In the 1980s, the graduate student from Calcutta, working on his doctorate in economics, was crunching data on Chinese villages. He crawled out one dawn from the basement of the Center for Educational Research at Stanford, where computer time was cheapest.

It was usual for Seth to unlock his bike as the raccoons were emerging from sewer gratings, but this time it was so late – or so early – that the Stanford Bookstore was just opening its doors at 7 a.m. Seth ducked in for a break and emerged with the book that would change his life: Charles Johnston’s new verse translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

What followed was a miracle: For more than a year, Seth feverishly wrote about 600 lines of verse a month of Pushkin-style sonnets. Seth, who had been a Stegner Fellow in 1977-78, used the Russian bard’s swift tetrameter, not pentameter, lines, along with a complicated rhyme scheme involving masculine and feminine endings, and also including Pushkin’s characteristic first-person digressions.

Seth wrote of harvesting olives on Campus Drive, lingering in the old Printers Inc bookshop café on California Avenue in Palo Alto and attending a concert at Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium. He wrote of San Francisco’s Coit Tower and Caffe Trieste – and, of course, the landmark Golden Gate Bridge, described in the libretto:

High-built, red-gold, with their long span– The most majestic spun by man –Whose threads of steel through mists and showers,Wind, spray, and the momentous roarOf ocean storms, link shore to shore.

Not all of the local events and places made it to Cummings’ opera, which the composer said “needed to be intimate and concentrated … to focus on the intense way lives interlaced with each other.” The opera follows the tightly bound fates of five Bay Area professionals, whose loves and lives sing through Seth’s inventive verse.

“Conrad loves the novel, and it shows – you can hear it,” said Chiyuma Elliott, the Stegner Fellow who coordinated the readings for the event. “It’s risky working with contemporary authors – it’s so easy to offend someone with the way you’ve reimagined their work. I think it says a lot that Seth is participating in this opera project and is excited about the ways his book is being recreated on stage.”

But how to turn Seth’s verbal music into sound?

The birth of an opera

Vikram Seth

Speaking from his New York City home, Cummings described how the opera was born. In the mid-1980s, Cummings was an artist at the Djerassi Foundation in the wooded hills above Woodside, Calif. Charles Martin, a poet and fellow resident who had just received Seth’s novel in manuscript, advised Cummings to keep an eye out for its publication. Cummings found the book a year or so later in New York and couldn’t put it down.

Cummings told his Russian mother in San Francisco about the book “because she’s a fan of Pushkin.”

“She told me she knew all about it,” Cummings said. “That she’d met Vikram at a reading of Golden Gate at City Lights Bookstore a few days before, and that he was coming to her house to hear her readEugene Onegin in Russian.” It was as good as an introduction.

Seth gave Cummings permission to use lines from TheGolden Gate in a concert piece commissioned by the San Francisco Opera Center for the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series. Called “Fragments from The Golden Gate,” the piece was favorably reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle when it premiered in December 1986, only half a year after the novel was published.

But Seth still hadn’t heard it. That part of the story picks up again in 1987 at the Djerassi Foundation, where this time Seth was in residence.

Cummings drove up the treacherous, twisty roads and fog-shrouded hills above Woodside to meet his collaborator at last. Cummings recalled the two of them, crouched over the cassette player in Cummings’ parked car at the foundation, listening to “Fragments.” Seth was pleased.

The opera was born two decades later. Opera News named it one of the best operas of the new century, and Stephen Smith of the New York Times praised it.

But it was still far from the place that gave it birth. Enter Fishkin, who championed its arrival at Stanford. “The story of my interest isn’t complicated,” she said. “Ever since I saw it at Lincoln Center, I wanted to bring it here. The Stanford connections made it perfect for the first year of the Bing Concert Hall.”

The “uncomplicated” part was born of friendship: Fishkin has been friends with Cummings since they were in the same residential college at Yale, decades ago. Now Fishkin lives in Cummings’ native land, and Cummings is the returning son. And Golden Gate has come home at last.

Among the quieter events in a busy week at Stanford: about a hundred friends, colleagues, students, and family members gathered at the Stanford Humanities Center to commemorate the life and work of one of Stanford’s most eminent figures, Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank … well, “Dostoevsky scholar” … he was so much more than that.

As author Jeffrey Meyers of Princeton noted during his talk that afternoon (his remarks are published in his retrospective here):

Learned, widely read, and well informed about a wide range of subjects, Joe could talk intelligently about almost anything. The depth of his knowledge was astonishing and delightful. We talked about our current work, classic and recent books, Russian writers from Gogol to Solzhenitsyn, major biographers, struggles with editors, conferences attended, favorite films (if not, for Joe, “too depressing”), mutual friends in Stanford and Berkeley, wide-ranging travels, current politics, children and grandchildren, jokes and literary gossip. It was especially interesting to compare our reviews of the same book, Olivier Todd’s excellent life of André Malraux. I urged him to read the novels of Olivia Manning, J.F. Powers, and James Salter; he retaliated, unfairly I thought, by suggesting the German philosopher Max Scheler, “the founder of the sociology of knowledge.”

I liked to hear Joe reminisce about distinguished writers who’d been his friends—Allen Tate, John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Anthony Burgess, and Carlos Fuentes — and urged him (unsuccessfully) to write a memoir about them. He remembered Elizabeth Bishop telling him of her visits to Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in D.C. and getting books for him from the Library of Congress. He recalled seeing Mary McCarthyin a hospital in New York, just before she died, and her pressing his hand at the time. He’d met the reclusive South African novelist and Nobel Prize winner, J.M. Coetzee, and found him “quite laconic and reserved, but with a kind of genuine inner warmth with people he likes.”

Bill Chace, president of Emory, opened the memorial event with the remark, “If Joe were with us today …,” or words to that effect. Nobody seemed to notice at the moment the lights flickered for a moment, and then came on again. Well, it is easy to make too much of small things, but still, for this observer it was a poignant moment, as if Joe were saying, “Don’t write me off just yet!” One comment from Bill Chace’s remarks that I scribbled in my program: “He had no enemies.” From what I knew of Joe, it was true … but how? How does one get through a life like this one without accumulating any enemies? Given Joe’s unconventional path through academia, there must have been dozens of jealous or resentful knives sharpened for him.

Perhaps part of the secret was related by Marilyn Yalomin her remarks. She recalled how Joe used to light up when she came into the room. It was only later that she realized that his face lit up when anyone entered the room. We all thought he only had eyes for us – but that was only a fragment of his genial charm.

Granddaughter Sophie Lilla, a freshman at New York University, recalled the story of Joe leaping off the bus in postwar Paris, a stop before his intended one. He had seen an attractive woman on the bus and didn’t want to let the opportunity slip. And shortly afterward, he went so far as to marry her. Sophie said she wished she had the nerve – but I suspect she does (she’s could pass for the woman who inspired the incident so many years ago, her grandmama Marguerite Frank). The tributes were interspersed with Benny Goodman tunes, and Lensky’s aria from Tchaikovsky‘s Eugene Onegin, a favorite of his.

Great musicians, it is said, do not choose their calling—music chooses them. Reading and rereading Joseph Frank’s writings, it seems the spirit of modernity itself chose him to be its voice—a great choice for the age when brute force remaking the world was matched and animated by a titanic struggle of ideas.

Joe and the lady he saw on a Paris bus, in Linda Cicero’s now-iconic photo.

How else to explain, then, that Frank’s debut in Scholastic,bore a title more fitting for the epilogue of a career: “Prolegomena to All Future Literary Criticism?” The year was 1935. Frank was seventeen and an orphan. A mere decade later, while he worked as a reporter, came entry into the big leagues: The Idea of Spatial Form. His last book, Responses to Modernity, with a telling subtitle Essays in the Politics of Culture, was published just a few months before illness claimed him. In-between, there are almost three hundred essays and reviews, some in French, and a monumental biography of a Russian writer whose fictional characters come alive even as they reenact the metaphysical mystery play of the modern era.

Frank’s stutter, which he struggled with all his life (but I remember with fondness), looks in retrospect like a mark of election. The affliction came along with an extraordinary aesthetic talent and a gift for empathy. The stutter forced him to develop, while still in his teens, a powerful voice as a writer of critical prose. Authoritative and subtle, uncompromis­ing yet forgiving, it was so deeply resonant and expressive that had Hollywood come calling, only an Orson Welles with the strut of John Wayne could have filled the bill. Its force is already present in his “Dedication to Thomas Mann,” published in the NYU student journal in 1937; it is undiminished in “Thinkers and Liars,” one of his last pieces in The New Republic, and it reverberates throughout the entirety of his Dostoevsky Pentateuch, the first five books of every Slavicist Bible.

His writer’s voice was Aaron to his Moses, except that it was inflected with an extraordinary aesthetic intelligence—and a sense of empathy, too. For Frank, the world picture—like a poem for T.S. Eliot, as Frank noted wryly—had to “preserve some ‘impurity’ if it was to be humanly meaningful.”

I haven’t blogged the talk I gave on this occasion – and I don’t expect to – but you can read the earlier retrospective I wrote for Stanford Magazinehere.

With all these articles and comments, and the memories of the man himself, which keep returning to me at odd moments, I’m coming to understand the scale of our loss. My appreciation for him grows, and in retrospect, I am humbled even more that he, who had so much to offer, appreciated me. But he appreciated everyone, I suspect. Maybe that’s why he had no enemies.

Anne Stevenson turned 80 in January – and the occasion whizzed past without my noticing it. So it was a pleasure to be reminded of my neglect by the Times Literary Supplement this week, in an article by Thea Lenarduzzi. I was also unaware of Anne’s newest “probably my last” collection, Astonishment. I wrote about Anne a dozen years ago, here, and have had the pleasure of visiting her at both her residences, in Durham, and more recently staying in Wales, where she lives with husband Peter Lucas in a 17th century cottage near Llanbedr.

“One has to maintain a distance, an air pocket between the poet and the poem—a pocket of objectivity. The poem isn’t an expression of what you could say better in ordinary language, or in theoretical language,” she told me in 2000.

“I do believe that writing poetry is not something everybody needs to indulge in. Encouraging more and more people to express themselves and, above all, to publish poems or put them on the internet, does tend to thin the blood—of literature, I mean. People forget how to read. They forget that you need to develop a strong degree of attention to read intelligently the poetry of, say, Auden or Yeats, or even Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop. You need to be sensitive to all the sounds, rhythms, echoes, et cetera, that constitute a poem to know what’s going on in it. If nothing is going on except the promulgation of some one-dimensional idea or personal experience, if the so-called poem is nothing but a cut-up piece of not-very-interesting prose, then it isn’t poetry at all. It’s not asking anything of the reader, except perhaps fellow-feeling or sympathy.”

“A pocket of objectivity”

Not surprisingly, she is still a woman of strong opinions. From the TLS piece:

More overtly underwhelmed by the possibilities of mixed media was Stevenson. “There’s an awful lot of poetry about”, she said, emphasizing one word in particular. “And with 9,000 teachers of Creative Writing in US Colleges, turning out ten protégés each . . . you’re bound to bring the standard down”. With characteristically wry humour she questioned that age-old obsession with “doing something ‘new’” (“it’s terribly hard to do anything new, you know”), which operates at the expense of more self-probing verse (not to be confused with the “Words about words about words to pamper the ego / Of some theoretical bore”); and “Do It Yourself Poetry” built in ignorance of proper craftsmanship (with no sense of rhythm, form, heritage ). “We are losing contact with language . . . . I wouldn’t even begin to talk about the visual arts, ‘Conceptual Art…’” (that carefully placed emphasis again, a glint in her eye, and a laugh: “I am eighty, you know!”).

“I’ll just throw all of that in”, Stevenson quipped before bringing the evening to a close with a reading of her most recent poem, “An Old Poet’s View from the Departure Platform”, its final stanza running thus:

“I gaze over miles and miles of cut up prose, / Uncomfortable troubles, sad lives. / They smother in sand the fire that is one with the rose. / The seed, not the flower survives.”

Oh, and this will keep me in my place: she says ““Blog is the ugliest word I ever heard …” Read the whole thing here.

I have a truckload of Dante at my home. I have the authoritative Charles Singleton prose translation, the Dorothy Sayersverse translation with her copious notes, along with her two volumes of Dante essays, I have the overlooked Peter Dale translation, I even have the Longfellow translation, and Daniel Halpern‘s “Dante’s Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets,” including Seamus Heaney, Carolyn Forche, Deborah Digges, C.K. Williams, W.S. Merwin, and others. I have books on Dante by John Freccero and Mark Musa and R.W.B. Lewis, and William Anderson and heaven knows who else… that’s in addition to several translations of La Vita Nuova and De Monarchia. What more can be said? Lots, it appears.

San Francisco as Paradise.

Dante Alighieri is in the news again … and how could it be otherwise with a new book from Dan Brown (of Da Vinci Code fame) called Inferno? “For all its absurdities, Brown’s book is a comfort, because it proves that the Divine Comedy is still alive in our culture,” writes Joan Acocella in The New Yorker. Otherwise…

As we saw in The Da Vinci Code, there is no thriller-plot convention, however well worn, that Brown doesn’t like. The hero has amnesia. He is up against a mad scientist with Nietzschean goals. He’s also up against a deadline: in less than twenty-four hours, he has been told, the madman’s black arts will be forcibly practiced upon the world. Though this book, unlike The Da Vinci Code and Brown’s Angels and Demons (2000), is not exactly an ecclesiastical thriller, it takes place largely in churches and, as the title indicates, it constantly imports imagery from the Western world’s most famous eschatological thriller, Dante’s Inferno. Wisely, Brown does not let himself get hog-tied by the sequence of events in Dante’s poem. Instead, he just inserts allusions whenever he feels that he needs them. There are screams; there is excrement. The walls of underground caverns ooze disgusting liquid. Through them run rivers of blood clogged with corpses. Bizarre figures come forward saying things like “I am life” and “I am death.” Sometimes the great poet is invoked directly. The book’s villain is a Dante fanatic and the owner of Dante’s death mask, on which he writes cryptic messages. Scolded by another character for his plans to disturb the universe, he replies, “The path to paradise passes directly through hell. Dante taught us that.”

Acocella doesn’t stick with Brown, however. Most of her focus is on the new translations of The Divine Comedy by Clive James and Mary Jo Bang. Both poets take a lot of liberties. We’ve written about the latter translation here, and as for the James translation … it sounds like it’s worth a read. But read Acocella’s whole review here.

Acocella notes that “Translators are not the only ones drawn to Dante. Since 2006, Roberto Benignihas been touring a solo show about the Divine Comedy” – the we wrote about that here – “In 2010, Seymour Chwast rendered the poem as a graphic novel. There are Inferno movies and iPad apps and video games.” Ahhh, but she does not complete the list. She neglected to mention San Francisco’s very own version of Dante (also on our shelves) by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, published by Chronicle Books, which opens:

About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,
I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place,
I’m not sure how I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns.

Only they weren’t. Not all of them, anyway. She has a set of 54 cards – that’s 18 from the Inferno, 18 from Purgatorio, and 18 from Paradiso. (Purgatory is pictured at the top of this post, and according to my Singleton translation, it says, quite rightly, “The angel who came to earth with the decree of peace, wept for since many a year…”)

“They’re in good condition, too – no writing on the cards or creases on them. That’s pretty rare,” Chris said of the cards, which are around a century old. Needless to say, I was thoroughly charmed by them.

Here’s the description:

[SBORGI, E.]. Alighieri, Dante. LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. Firenze, Italia: Sborgi. 54 postcards, horizontal format. 3 1/2” x 5 1/2”. Color postcards printed on heavy cardstock, likely early 20th century, as Sborgi, a major printer and publisher of chromo- lithographic art cards, operated as a business from 1910-1917. Each card features an embossed and elaborately illustrated, gilt-ruled frame of angels, devils, and condemned souls along with Dante’s verse depicted in the picture inside the frame. On the left side of each card is a portrait of Dante at his writing desk. The right side of each card features selected scenes from one of the cantos of the Commedia.The verso of each card has a verse from the canto depicted on the front, some lines for writing, and a space for a stamp. All of the cards are unused, bright, and attractive with very mild corner wear. Two of the cards have small areas of rubbing on the front (Paradiso XVI and Paradiso XXXI).

They sell for $1,000. Alas, “too dear for my possessing.” I didn’t have the coin for such a purchase, but I did take a few photos with my cellphone – at right and above.

In addition to iPad apps and video games Acocella mentions, there have been plenty of literary, art, and musical interpretations down through the centuries. Lots has been composed, written, and riffed about the Francesca da Rimini episode of the Inferno (we wrote about that here) – but too often overlooked is Puccini‘s only comedy, Gianni Schicchi, a one-act opera often paired with his Suor Angelica.

Renata Scotto performed both in one afternoon – that’s a lot of singing, and explains why some sensitive connoisseurs found this exceptional “O mio babbino caro” a little ragged around the edges – as is this low-res youtube clip. But it’s well worth the two minutes. Scotto’s endearing interpretation of the role is matchless – concert performances of this aria by Callas & Co. tend to treat it like high tragedy, but in the context of this short opera, from an episode in the Inferno, is clearly about a spoiled brat trying to wring some bling out of daddy-o.

One week until the “Another Look” book club event for Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 28, at the Stanford Humanities Center. I wrote about it here. Read the book, join us, have some fun, and come up and introduce yourself to Humble Moi. I’ll be there.

Meanwhile, enjoy this selection from the book, in which Lorelei Lee meets Dr. Froyd in Vienna, which she explains is somewhere in “the Central of Europe.”

From Lorelei’s May 27 diary:

Cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.

“Well finaly I broke down and Mr. Spoffard said that he thought a little girl like I, who was trying to reform the whole world was trying to do to much, especially beginning on a girl like Dorothy. So he said there was a famous doctor in Vienna called Dr. Froyd who could stop all of my worrying because he does not give a girl medicine but he talks you out of it by psychoanalysis. So yesterday he took me to Dr. Froyd. So Dr. Froyd and I had quite a long talk in the English landguage. So it seems that everybody seems to have a thing called inhibitions, which is when you want to do a thing and you do not do it. So then you dream about it instead. So Dr. Froyd asked me, what I seemed to dream about. So I told him that I never really dream about anything. I mean I use my brains so much in the day time that at night they do not seem to do anything else but rest. So Dr. Froyd was very very surprised at a girl who did not dream about anything. So then he asked me all about my life. I mean he is very very sympathetic, and he seems to know how to draw a girl out quite a lot. I mean I told him things that I really would not even put in my diary. So then he seemed very very intreeged at a girl who always seemed to do everything she wanted to do. So he asked me if I really never wanted to do a thing that I did not do. For instance, did I ever want to do a thing that was really vialent, for instance, did I ever want to shoot someone for instance. So then I said I had, but the bullet only went in Mr. Jennings lung and came right out again. So then Dr. Froyd looked at me and looked at me and he said he did not really think it was possible. So then he called in his assistance and he pointed at me and talked to his assistance quite a lot in the Viennese landguage. So then his assistance looked at me and looked at me and it really seems as if I was quite a famous case. So then Dr. Froyd said that all I need was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.”

We can’t lose an opportunity to wish Omar Khayyáma happy birthday, even though it’s already late afternoon in California. He was born in 1048 in Nayshapur, now in modern Iran. And fortunately, we have Don Shareto remind us of the event over at his blog “Squanderman.”

As Don notes:

“A brilliant polymath, Khayyám was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician and poet. Most renowned during his lifetime as a mathematician, Khayyám wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which, according to this Wikipedia entry, ‘laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Persian Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. In particular, he derived general methods for solving cubic equations and even some higher orders.’”

Mostly, however, Khayyám is remembered for his Rubáiyát, and in the English language, that means Edward FitzGerald‘s free translation:

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand Of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.

Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,
And Jamshyd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows;
But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,
And many a Garden by the Water blows …

Alright, alright … these are really really tired rhymes. But keep in mind that FitzGerald was writing in the late Victorian era, when nobody had gotten sick of them yet. To criticize today would be like getting grumpy at the words of Christmas carols. They have to be taken on their own terms.

The 101-verse semi-narrative FitzGerald finally assembled is the product of a ruthless editorial job – but how much poorer English poetry would be without it. His endeavour might more generously be termed “transcreation”. Khayyám, an agnostic famed during his lifetime as a mathematician and astronomer rather than a poet, and his mediator, a nineteenth-century English sceptic who believed that “science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad”, may not meet in a true linguistic union, but there seems to be a “marriage of true minds” nevertheless (and, yes, you’ll note a passing trace of Shakespeare in FitzGerald’s diction).

The speaker that emerges with such authority and panache, despite the stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter, has a voice unlike any other in Victorian poetry, and a philosophical sensibility which, while it has been compared to that of Epicurus and Lucretius, is new and distinct. A whole culture must have suddenly seemed within the imaginative reach of the poem’s first audience.

Illustration from the early, undated edition I have.

“Stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter”? Who sez? We must also respectfully disagree with the wise Don Share when he refers to the “jiggered” verse of FitzGerald. We’ll grant him the use of that word in the sense of “exhausted” or “shopworn.” Khayyám’s verses had been quoted by cheesy wannabe seducers until the maidens began laughing them out of the room. But FitzGerald’s verses would not have become clichés if they had not been so good in the first place. Would we even talk about Khayyám today if it were not for FitzGerald’s verses?

Tunisia has constructed a set of hotels named after Khayyam. One of the lunar craters has been named in honor of Omar Khayyám. The Omar Khayyám crater is located at 58.0N latitude and 102.1W longitude on the surface of moon. The Outer Main-belt Asteroid 1980 RT2 is also named in honor of Omar Khayyam. The Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader Che Guevara named his son Omar in honor of Khayyám and his work. Omar Pérez López is a Cuban writer and poet.

The American clergyman and activist Martin Luther King Jr.quoted Khayyám in his speech Why I oppose war in Vietnam: “It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America. Omar Khayyam is right ‘The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on.”

The late American novelist Kurt Vonnegutrefers to Khayyám’s “moving finger writes” quatrain in his novel Breakfast of Champions when the protagonist Dwayne Hoover reveals that he had been forced to memorize it in high school.

Don Share reminds us that poet Basil Bunting also was a fan:

A letter from Bunting to Louis Zukofsky (30 August 1933) included a transliterated and untranslated version of a rubai by Omar Khayyám – may their correspondence someday be published! – and in his introduction to Omar Pound’s Arabic & Persian Poems in English, Bunting wrote:

“Persian poetry has suffered badly, Arabic rather less, from neoplatonic dons determined to find an arbitrary mysticism in everything. You would think there was nothing else in Moslem [sic] poetry than nightingales which are not birds, roses which are not flowers, and pretty boys who are God in disguise. An anthology of English verse selected exclusively from George Herbert, Charles Wesley, and Father Hopkins, plus ‘Lead, kindly light’ and ‘The Hound of Heaven,’ would be as representative as the usual samples of Persian poetry. FitzGerald’s Khayyám is the only serious exception.”

The big problem, Persian scholars tell me, is that it’s not really Khayyám. For that you must look elsewhere. Or you might simply f0llow Don’s suggestion and try his two favorite editions of FitzGerald’s adaptation: the one by Daniel Karlinin the Oxford World Classics, and the critical edition byChristopher Decker.

But meanwhile, check out Don’s post here. He’s promising to lift a glass for old Khayyám tonight … and a second for Basil Bunting.

Postscript from Jeff Sypeck over at Quid Plura?, the day after Omar Khayyám’s birthday: FitzGerald’s translation has its stuffy moments, but its influence and ubiquity are remarkable–and so is the speed with which our culture has lost its knowledge of English-language poetry. I recall a “Garfield” comic strip (of all things) from the early 1980s that included the line, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.” I can’t imagine anyone hoping that a few young readers might catch the reference today.

Occasionally, you hear someone blather on about how art can change your soul. And far more rarely, you run across someone for whom it’s actually true.

Over at “A Piece of Monologue,” Rhys Trantor interviews 79-year-old actor and former felon Rick Cluchey, founding director of San Quentin Drama Workshop. Cluchey discovered Samuel Beckettand theater at the same time, while serving a sentence for armed robbery. It’s a moving and powerful story, and it’s here.

The occasion for the article: this month Cluchey was performing in one of Beckett’s very last plays, Krapp’s Last Tape, in Chicago. It’s a role Cluchey has put his stamp on. Even Beckett himself approved of the portrayal: “Rick is an impressive Krapp,” he confided in a letter. And he repeated variants of the same thought to others before his death in 1989.

Cluchey was paroled in 1966, and finally met his mentor in Berlin, 1975. He worked with the Irish playwright, and performed Krapp for the first time in 1977.

Since Cluchey’s first encounter with Beckett’s work in 1957, some fifty-six years have elapsed. I ask whether age has changed the way he performs the plays, or whether it’s changed what the texts mean to him. ‘No. Age has nothing to do with the template that Beckett has pressed into my soul. Beckett is the architect of the play, I follow his blue lines.’ Of Krapp’s Last Tape, he says: ‘I have played this part in three generations: prior to the age of Krapp in the play, whilst I was his age, and for many years after.’ Does the play, then, seem to remain relevant over the course of a whole lifetime? ‘Based on Beckett’s writing and direction, age shouldn’t be a factor.’

Apparently, Chicago agrees. According to Lawrence B. Johnson writing in Chicago on the Aisle: “Samuel Beckett died in 1989 at age 83, which gives one pause upon seeing that the current staging of his monodrama Krapp’s Last Tape produced by Shattered Globe Theatre is directed by Beckett himself. The answer is that the masterly impersonator of Krapp before us, Rick Cluchey, acquired the ticks, wrinkles and regrets of this hermetically sealed old man while working with Beckett late in the playwright’s life.

Curiously enough, we found a video of Cluchey performing the same role, also in Chicago, in 1981. It’s below.

As you might have gathered, I’ve been somewhat backlogged of late. Tonight, however, I was working on an interview transcript and checking a reference, when I ran across this passage in Joseph Brodsky‘s essay, “Collector’s Item,” in On Grief and Reason. It seemed like the good thought to share with Book Haven readers tonight, on a day when the news has been full of lies and spies and betrayal (like every other day)…

Back in the U.S.S.R. … at about 24

When I was twenty-four, I was after a girl, and in a big way. She was slightly older than I, and after a while I began to feel that something was amiss. I sensed that I was being deceived, perhaps even two-timed. It turned out, of course, that I wasn’t wrong, but that was later. At the time I simply grew suspicious, and one evening I decided to track her down. I hid myself in an archway across the street from her building, waited there for about an hour, and when she emerged from her poorly lit entrance, I followed her for several blocks. I was tense with excitement, but of an unfamiliar nature. At the same time, I felt vaguely bored, as I knew more or less what I might discover. The excitement grew with every step, with every evasive action I took; the boredom stayed at the same level. When she turned to the river, my excitement reached its crescendo, and at that point I stopped, turned around, and headed for a nearby café. Later I would blame my abandoning the chase on my laziness and reproach myself, especially in the light – or, rather, in the dark – of this affair’s denouement, playing an Actaeon to the dogs of my own hindsight. The truth was less innocent and more absorbing. The truth was that I stopped because I had discovered the nature of my excitement. It was the joy of a hunter pursuing his prey. In other words, it was something atavistic, primordial. This realization had nothing to do with ethics, with scruples, taboos, or anything of the sort. I had no problem with conferring upon the girl the status of prey. It’s just that I hated being the hunter. A matter of temperament, perhaps? Perhaps. Perhaps had the world been subdivided into the four humors, or at least boiled down to four humor-based political parties, it would be a better place. Yet I think that one’s resistance to turning into a hunter, the ability to spot and to control the hunting impulse, has to do with something more basic than temperament, upbringing, social values, received wisdom, ecclesiastical affiliation, or one’s concept of honor. It has to do with the degree of one’s evolution, with the species’ evolution, with reaching the stage marked by one’s ability to regress. One loathes spies not so much because of their low rung on the evolutionary ladder as because betrayal invites you to descend.

Postscript on 5/16: A comment from John Adams over at “Gentle Rereader” who writes:

The year that Brodsky pursued his double-agent in love, 1964, “Meditations on the Literature of Spying” questioned the public interest in espionage fiction. No need to resort to microfilm anymore, as The American Scholar republished the essay five years ago and has kept it up with this permalink: http://theamericanscholar.org/meditations-on-the-literature-of-spying/

The author sometimes wrote under the code name “Roger du Béarn,” but in this instance used his own name and plain-text style. A sample: “To know in advance that everything and everybody is a fraud gives the derivative types what they call a wry satisfaction. Their borrowed system creates the ironies that twist their smiles into wryness. They look wry and drink rye and make a virtue of taking the blows of fate wryly. It is monotonous; I am fed up with the life of wryly.”